Jacksonville cop charged in theft case

A Jacksonville police officer has been arrested in a theft case involving items disappearing from a Sheriff’s Office substation.

Cheryl G. Cummings, 43, was charged Friday after a $40 woman’s purse that was part of an undercover operation disappeared from the Cedar Hills station. Police operating on a tip sent an FBI agent to the substation with the purse and gift receipt in a J.C. Penney shopping bag and told Cummings he found the bag in the parking lot and was turning it in, said Undersheriff Dwain Senterfitt of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

Surveillance images showed Cummings taking the bag to her car, where it remained for several days, then disappeared, he said.

Senterfitt said theft of the purse is a misdemeanor.

He said after Cummings was contacted about the investigation, she also brought a missing wallet to police headquarters and told detectives with the agency’s integrity unit she had taken it home to try and find the owner.

Cummings has been an officer with the Sheriff’s Office since 1997 and had been working light duty at the substation for several years. The assignment was for medical reasons, Senterfitt said. During the investigation she will be assigned to other duties and stripped of police powers.

Cummings also had been arrested in what Senterfitt called a “very convoluted” theft case in 2004 involving the fixing of an individual’s credit rating for a fee. The State Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case, so the Sheriff’s Office did not take any administrative action.

In October 2011 Cummings was awarded a lifesaving award for actions to save the life of a citizen at the substation.

Whether it was the past SA, the present SA, or perhaps a future SA, after so many stories of so many agencies and individuals, alleging or reporting proven misconduct, when are we going to see a Grand Jury convened to investigate and report on such, just as we did in the 1960's, and the 1980's?

Such a Grand Jury, if run properly and as openly as possible, will allow for identification of wrong-doers, but more importantly let those who are doing their jobs well, as I believe most are, go on with their jobs and careers.

Just using stories in the FT-U for the past few years, it would appear that the entire City government and independent agencies should be placed under Grand Jury scrutiny.

========================================================================= When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

1459 points

Facts HURT

Saturday, February 16, 2013 @ 10:04 am

Reading these comments I just have to shake my head at all the people here who are blatantly so prejudice and bigoted. What if all these comments being made were based on her race or sex, that all African Americans or women must be thieves because this one African American woman was arrested. Would the posters be so quick to post with and agree with those comments?

The fact is that JSO set her up as soon as they suspected what she was doing. Not the FBI or anyone else, her fellow JSO officers put her behind bars. As to the previous case, the case was really a civil dispute rather than a criminal one, that's why charges were dropped.

Watching the comments here you would think she is such an evil person...but she did save someone's life. How many people commenting here have done that?

Yes she will be prosecuted and fired, but that doesn't change the fact that some very prejudiced people here are making some really broad generalizations about all of JSO. Funny how so many of these prejudiced people are left leaning and profess to be "open minded" and "caring". In fact, they are just your run of the mill bigots. One of them even made a comment about not trusting all police officers during a trial, but if he doubts the veracity of all police officers, how does he know that the top cop in Jacksonville, the Sheriff, is being truthful? Does he only trust cops when it fits his political agenda?

In the big scheme of things, I think saving someone's life is a lot greater plus than the minus of a petty theft when you finally get judged at the end. She will lose her job, maybe go to jail, and could lose her pension rights depending on the outcome of the criminal case. She is having her name dragged through the mud and she's having an anonymous peanut gallery throw stones at her. BTW, in cases like this, a civilian with no previous convictions would never be sentenced to time in jail, and most likely would not even have a conviction on their record.

So before we all have rocks flying all around the glass house, we instead need to step back and look at our own mistakes through life and decide if we are truly the ones to be so critical of others. Police officers are human, just like the rest of us, and as such, none are infallible and neither are we.